Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2014 iii Paper 37 1 b Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
The feasible triangle has verticesThese come from the three pairs of active boundary lines and satisfy the remaining inequalities. Its denominator is positive at each vertex, with minimum , so is positive throughout the triangle because it is an affine function.
For a direct linear programming optimality certificate, add twice the second inequality to the third to get . Thus , equivalently . Division by the positive denominator gives an objective at most . Both inequalities used in the bound are equalities at , where the first inequality is also satisfied. ThereforeEquality requires the two bounding inequalities to be tight, so this optimizer is unique.